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Welcome back to intentionally disturbing with Dr. Leslie. Today I am talking to you about coercive control. Many trending words are going around. Gaslighting, triangulation. But what does this all mean? Let's get into it with some real life true crime cases, but also some celebrity legal cases. People often think that they can see coercive control, psychological manipulation, that it's really obvious, like a villain in a movie, but really it's not. And it's very subtle and nuance, just like all the other manipulation and harm do to us. Sometimes it could look like Sean Combs, who is what? People loved him, right at some point, but he was manipulating Cassie and many other people to be in majorly abusive relationships and also to be complicit. People were returning because he held the keys to the mansion that he promised everyone. That's coercive control. It could also look like some kind of influencer couple online smiling as though their relationship is really real. Sadly, sometimes when an unaliving occurs, we blame the person who took their own life when really they took it because somebody was manipulating them so seriously. Or in the case of Michaela Settles I talked about, the biological father had graped, the daughter, she couldn't live with herself. Of course, this is all alleged, right? Yeah, he didn't go to the hearing, so we're still waiting for that to happen. But she ended her life because she couldn't tolerate what he had done. And she journaled about it and she told people about it and they were aware. So that included actual physical and sexual violence. But yeah, it's coercive control as well. Control, fear, degradation, isolation, living under a constant threat that nobody else knows about and you can barely even put into words. This is why coercive control is so dangerous and why people hide it because they can't fully understand it or communicate it to others. And this is also why I told a federal judge once that I thought coercive control was more dangerous and violent than actual physical violence. And he was shocked. He was also 80, 83. So, you know, he's not really up to date on what we are learning now about coercive control and all the research that's being done on it. But don't worry, I'm here to tell you about it. Coercive control hides behind what seems to be love. It hides behind status. It hides behind fame. If there's no bruise, there's no abuse. Right, guys? Well, I hate to tell you, but that story is going to get you unalived yourself because that's a bunch of bullshit. That is definitely an old school mentality. So we've had some cases lately that have really forced the public to actually confront and understand coercive control. The question we need to answer is how can someone really dominate another person without looking like a monster in the real world? You know, the narcissistic partner who leaves and no one ever really validated her, but she's like, oh, my God, how could nobody have seen the torture and the danger I was in? Well, he only did it to her, and he was perfect to everybody else. Now, some of these celebrity cases are way worse, but the most common thing are relationships where the guy is narcissistic and he's beautiful and wonderful to everybody else, so they don't believe what's actually happening in the household. It's so invalidating that the person minimizes it. Gaslights themselves themselves and basically doesn't do anything about it. But let's go back to Cassie Ventura and Sean Calmes. Or in Mate Combs, whatever. I don't really care if he has a name because he's such a monster. It's a really good example of a celebrity power imbalance. Okay, so publicly, this wasn't just a bad relationship story. I mean, we have seen a lot of videos. 2023, civil lawsuit against Sean Combs. It opened up a world of discovery and other things, but it showed years of physical abuse, sexual abuse, coercion, threats, and the control he had. The case settled really fast in 2023. And if you look far back on my YouTube and feeds, you can see that I covered, like, every single fucking day of this case. If I never have to hear lube again, I will be very, very happy. Or temperatures and hotel rooms and extra money for cleanup or hanging women over fucking apartments. Monster. But in 2025, this is the big part where Ventura testified in the Sean Combs trial that, you know, I think, I don't know, the people for the government kind of fucked up. Didn't do a great job. But Ventura testified in the Combs federal criminal trial and reporting from various outlets that covered the. The prosecutors continually argued that the threats and financial control were part of this alleged coercive control dynamic. But he was acquitted of trafficking and he was convicted of a lesser prosecution related charge. And of course, his lawyers did not deny that he had been physically violent with Cassie, as we saw in the video where he was pummeling her in a towel. His towel didn't fall off. It was like, well, he's done this before. There was a Comfort with it. Yeah, that was the violence following all of the coercive control. But Cassie's case is really important because it forces people to understand coercive control in the context of celebrities and money and fame and security teams and careers, contracts, images, dependency, all this shit. We were like, whoa, we're actually seeing this right in front of us. I can't even tell you how many people asked, well, why didn't she just leave the relationship? I mean, even Bill Maher asked that. To which I told him, why don't you have somebody just piss in your mouth? Bill Maher, he basically said that she was letting Sean Combs urinate in her mouth because she wanted to rise in her career. Showing that he had absolutely no understanding of coercive control, of manipulation, because he's basically an older white male who doesn't give a shit and is misogynistic and is just living in the system where this has always been. Okay, but now we're finally talking about it. So, yeah, I went on TMZ Live. I think there was a slight delay because they did have to bleep me a few times. And I told Bill Maheroff I thought it was great. They gave me 11 minutes notice that I was going to do it. So it's pretty raw. It's on my website if anyone wants to watch it. So if you're going to ask, why didn't she leave? Then you're ignoring the power of this massive ecosystem that she was stuck in. This was not just two people in a messy relationship. The allegations involved a man with enormous amounts of wealth. A little dick, I hear. Staff, industry, power, access, surveillance capacity, ongoing violence and these cycles of violence and the ability to affect someone's career and their entire public relation, like their entire future. This is one of the key lessons of coercive control. The cage is not always like the one behind me. It's not always made to lock doors. If you're listening to this, I have a jail cell in my office. But sometimes the cage or the jail is made out of money and contracts and secrets and career dependency and humiliation and sexual exploitation and the belief that nobody will believe you because he is more powerful than you. So, you know that's not love, right? That's not a relationship that's being held hostage by someone. Now, let's also talk about the Gabby Petito and Bryan Laundrie case because, well, we have the body cam footage and it taught us quite a bit. It taught us that we are really good at misreading body language. Gabby Petito was killed by Brian Laundrie in 2021. And the case became a national example in discussions about intimate partner violence and coercive control. So once again, these cases are forcing us to talk about this and learn about it. So there was a Netflix documentary and it really, really was educational. I think it really, people understand and it emphasized like the warning signs in the body cam footage, including Gabby appearing distressed when, when Brian appeared calmer and framed the conflict in ways that made her look like she was the actual problem. University of Alaska Fairbanks commentary. I don't know if you guys heard this, but in 2026, specifically, they highlighted the details, such as the Gabby case, saying she had been locked out of the van, her fear of separation, and how those details can signal coercive control. So what they did was they went a step further. They used discernment. They actually tried to understand the larger situation and the psychological manipulation. Gabby's case is one of the clearest public examples of why victim presentation is often misunderstood. Now imagine if this was live and a jury was watching. The same misunderstanding holds. There are still fuckers like Bill Maher on the jury. So we need to educate ourselves and everyone around us about this. She was crying in the body cam footage. She was overwhelmed. But Brian was calm. He looked very calm. And this is where I think the public, the police, the courts and families, even clinicians, influencers, content creators, whatever, they can make these catastrophic mistakes and spread misinformation, because calm does not mean that you're safe. Emotional does not mean that you're the aggressor. Right? We need to use discernment. A dysregulated victim, survivor, whatever you want to call it, may look unstable because their nervous system has been living under threat. So of course you're going to look erratic. A coercive controller may look very calm because they aren't afraid, because they're managing the room. And in fact, they're happy to see the other person erratic because it shows them that what they're doing is working. They're also probably smiling inside, thinking this is the footage that everyone's going to see showing she's erratic and I'm calm and I'm going to get away with this. So what I'm telling you is that if you only evaluate a snapshot of things, you are going to miss the system that's in play. And I think we do this a lot when we have televised, media sized cases. Coercive control lives in the patterns. It's about pattern recognition, which is something Again, I talk about in my book, a ton book soon to come. Not the dramatic moment everybody finally sees at the end. It's all the. Let's call it a bowl of spaghetti. Not a single piece of spaghetti. There have also been numerous cases in the uk, in America, where people have ended their lives because their partners told them to, or their partners were just so abusive, emotionally, psychologically abusive, that these individuals felt like they were worthless, that they shouldn't live anymore, and they ended their lives. And in some countries, they are holding people accountable. Not so much. Well, not so much in California. Some states are. In Massachusetts, they held Michelle Carter accountable for doing that to her boyfriend. They are passing coercive control bills and laws like in Australia. But we have a long way to go, guys. If you want to jump on a fight, that's a fight to jump on. And of course, why not talk about the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni situation? Let's just call it a situation. The coercive control in that situation, in that legal case, so much was psychological manipulation and the descriptions of how it played out on set with all of these men and the manipulation and the harm that they were doing to the women. This is not gonna. This isn't over yet, you guys. But it's real. It happened. And we have all these Baldoni people wanting to go crazy and say that, you know, he should have won and blah, blah, blah. I don't care where you're. Where you stand, but what I'm telling you is it's a big deal to understand the coercive control within that lawsuit, within that movie set within the smear campaign and how massive the smear campaign was. Her case showed that there were ties in the smear campaign to Epstein, to politics, to people who are in the current administration. You guys, like, the dark psychology of this is very real. And people are paid to use coercive control tactics and techniques, manipulating public image. You know, these. The selective leaking of information going on these podcasts, blitz and manipulating even legal information. The subtle manipulation, the nuances that people weren't picking up and they just wanted to kind of jump on the bandwagon of a team and go. That's where everyone missed the abuse of power. They missed the coercive control within that smear campaign. I could go into depth about the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. That one's kind of close to home for me. And I'm still really. I'm not quite sure because with the psychological assessment involved, we had so much more data and information, and that was Very, very interesting, the testimony of Dr. Shannon Curry. Now, most of the cases I'm kind of referencing here with coercive control, they don't involve psychological assessments. But that was. I mean, that was a killer power play when it comes to coercive control making. Johnny Depp's team made Amber Heard take a psychological assessment. That's abuse of authority in a sense, as even if her assessment showed that there were things awry. Right. Why didn't he take one? Why didn't he take a psychological assessment? Good question. How do we decide who's better, who's right? I guess by who has the better PR team, public relations, crisis management. This is so. Oh, God, Celebrities in Hollywood. It's so fucked. You'll never really know the truth unless you've actually been in the case and had to sign the NDA. I also don't know where I stand with the Taylor, Frankie, Paul and Dakota mortise then. I haven't really looked too much into it, but it does, to me, feel like there are struggles on both sides. And then the footage, you know, he's in one of the videos I saw, you know, he's recording her and he's much calmer than her and she's erratic. Now, is that similar to Gabby Petito? I don't know that we will see. But again, step back and use discernment and think about, like, his presentation and maybe what led to her having that presentation. That doesn't take her off the hook. Maybe there's issues there. But we can can hold both ideas. We can have duality at the same time, and then we can kind of wait to see how it plays out. And, you know, sadly, sometimes we'll never know, but at least we'll do it honorably. So let's break down these trending words and coercive control, because I know you hear them, and I just want to make sure you understand them. First, let's talk about love bombing and intensity. Okay, so love bombing is where control is really disguised. The density of the control is in that love bombing. Have you ever had a friend, or maybe it's you who's just said, you know, I've never felt this way about the guy. I love him so much, and it's so fast, and then they're moving in with the person right away. They're sharing their credit cards, their financial situation. They're saying, I love you. And everybody's like, red flag, red flag. There's a Netflix movie or an Amazon prime movie that just came, and it's called He's a narcissist. And I actually think it's really cute and good, and it explains this well. But the love bombing can happen in the cycle of violence, but it can also happen right away. And that's where I tell all of you, other people's pressure is. Is not your own. You don't need to take on someone else's pressure, especially at the beginning of dating. Access is huge in coercive control. Are you giving them your passwords, your location? Are they looking at your phone? Do they know your schedule? Are you sharing money? Are you giving money to them all of a sudden? Are you, like, having the same friends? Are you being isolated from certain friends? Are they telling you what clothing to wear? Are they demanding sex when you don't really want it? So it's all like, we're building this coercive control lad, this chain. We're building a jail that you can sit in isolation is huge. They're going to make you think that your friends don't like you. Maybe they don't like you as a couple, maybe they don't like him. But they have to stick with you. No, I'm sorry. They don't have to stick with you. You have to stick with him. Not your friends anymore, because your allegiance is to him. So he's going to isolate you in that way. He might tell you that your family is toxic and isolate you in that way. Your therapist might actually start turning against you because your therap or your psychologist is telling you, hey, this is not a healthy relationship. But you aren't turning away. You are turning towards him. And then you're relying on him, right? And you're saying, you know, things are bad. I feel really lonely. I miss my friends, and I need your support because you're the only one left. Degradation. Big word, Big meaning. You're crazy. You're unstable. You're lucky I stay. No one will ever believe you if you talk about this, like the abuse or whatever. So they're going to degrade you. They're going to make you feel small. It's going to hurt your confidence. You're not going to be as willing to speak up. Surveillance and punishment. Now, surveillance isn't just like cameras, right? It's tracking you on your phone. It's constantly calling you to see where you are. And if you're going to answer, monitoring your behaviors before, during, and after, you know, threatening you. It can be a cold threat where it's kind of like, I'm not going to take you on that date. Or something like that if you don't do what I want. And then it can turn towards a hot threat where it's actually physical violence. Violence. So also humiliation. Legal threats are big threats to your career. Definitely threats to custody if children are involved. Threats of making up stories and calling CPS big, big. I really wish judges did not just fucking lean on CPS workers so much because there's so much corruption in family court and custody and cps. I mean, look at lawsuits against San Bernardino County, California, CPS right now. Entrapment is a huge part of coercive control, where the victim is no longer asking, do I love this person? But then they're really asking, what is the least dangerous option for me to be around this person today or to just exist? Now, if you're asking yourself that, okay, red flag. I mean, all of these are red flags. This is when you leave. When you start to see these red flags, you run. But here's the problem. When you do start to separate, that's when all of this escalates. And I think that's what we saw in the Sean Combs case the most. In Cassie's allegations, the public saw the power and dependency version. In Gabby Petito, the public saw how victim presentation can be completely misread. And in these celebrity cases, we are seeing this new modern layer of cameras and public relations and crisis management and fan armies, content creator armies, social media reputations on attacks and the monetization of someone else's trauma. The things people have said about Blake Lively as a woman are fucking horrifying. So I really want it to be clear that coercive control is not just jealousy. Like jealousy might be a little bit of a costume of the greater, more epic dynamic of coercive control. The control is underneath it. Underneath the costume, you're not going to see it. And people who are outside of the relationship or the intimate circle are certainly not going to see it. A jealous person may feel insecure, right? Well, a coercive controller will use that insecurity as jurisdiction. It's like suddenly your phone is evidenced, your clothing is evidence, Your tone is evidence. Your delay in texting back is evidence. Your friends, your work schedule, your exhaustion. You are living in a courtroom all the time with a coercive controller. They are the judge, the prosecutor, jury, and definitely the emotionally unstable bailiff. So that's why I'm telling you why these cases matter so much, because they allow us to understand coercive control more. And we actually are seeing it in front of our own eyes. We've heard things lately like, but she had money, she had power with true crime cases. But the police came with influencer cases. But they were still posting together. Family alienation, intimate partner and homicide cases. Everything looked normal when I checked in, says the CPS officer. But that's the whole point, guys. Coercive control does not require the relationship to look bad to outsiders. It requires the victim to feel trapped inside. I'm going to tell you a little secret here about how the public gets manipulated by coercive control, okay? First, we overvalue the calm person. The calmness. The person who looks composed gets treated as credible. The person crying immediately, we judge as unstable. Second, we completely overvalue success if the accused person is famous, wealthy, charming, talented, religious, charitable, or professionally respected. People assume that they just cannot be abusive. Oh my God, are they a movie star? Oh my God. They can't be abusive. Third, we punish inconsistency. Yes, that's very true. Trauma can make our memory very fragmented, especially in complex post traumatic stress disorder. We're going to have delayed disclosure and our behavior is going to seem confusing and erratic. And people, especially misogynistic men, are going to say we're lying, when really it's because they don't understand what is going on in our brain and our nervous system. It does not mean that every claim is true. And I really want you to know that because women do lie. But it means that inconsistency must be evaluated. And that's what I do in my time job. I evaluate clinically and contextually. It's not just like looking or asking a question and looking at one document. I mean, I spend 30, 40, 50 hours looking at supporting information, collateral information, psychological assessments that are normed across hundreds of thousands of other people. Lie detection tests. I mean, it is elaborate. If I'm going to take the stand and testify to what we would call truth, it is going to be a very extensive psychological battery that I have conducted based and anchored in science and research. The gold standards in American research and psychology, especially forensic psychology. Fourth, we confuse leaving with actual safety. People ask why victims stayed, but separation can actually be the highest risk period of abuse. When you try to leave, the percentages are the highest. That that's when he's going to end your life or do something horrible, harm your children, drain your bank accounts. I mean, you just. It is the scariest part. So women don't leave because they know that that scariest part is gonna happen and they know the guy so well that he's gonna follow through on it because it's been building. Now, fifth, we fall for mutual toxicity. It's a trap. Yes, relationships can be mutually unhealthy. Of course, most are. Not mine. Okay, anyways. But that's probably cause I'm married to a psychologist. But coercive control is about as. So who has the power, who's afraid, who's being isolated, who's being monitored, and really who's losing their freedom in the relationship. It's also interesting, this fascination with true crime, because true crime has trained people to look for like the final act, right? The unaliving, the end of the life, the missing person report, the 911 dispatch call, the body cam footage, and then, you know, the, the conviction and the sentencing. But coercive control makes us kind of rewind and re look at things like who's controlling the money, who's controlling the phone, who's controlling the narrative. Was the victim isolated? So we can look back now at true crime cases differently than really ever before because we've never had this level of research and understanding of coercion. So I want you to remember that kind of coercive control ladder and things to look for in yourself and your friends and relationships. Tensity, access, isolation, degradation, surveillance, trap, meant and separate, desperation, escalation, right? They know when they leave that it's going to be horrible. Oftentimes it is, but oftentimes it's also successful. So I'm talking about coercive control. And I don't want you to picture someone and just like think that this is them, right? Don't over diagnose people. But what I want you to do and what I talk about in my book is I want you to trust your intuition. You know, if you have a pattern of feeling odd or you're going away from your baseline and something's coming up for you, I want you to trust that. You know, maybe you journal it, maybe you tell a therapist, maybe you tell a friend. But write it down to the point where you have literal physical evidence or you have somebody who can tell you what you said. Because if you are in a coercive control relationship and manipulation is present, you're gonna question that you ever had that initial intuitive feeling at the beginning, and you're gonna gaslight yourself. You're. You're gonna tell yourself you're wrong and you're not gonna believe it. I want you to picture, picture a celebrity. You know, allegedly has everything except freedom. It's so hard to picture that, right? You got a celebrity, somebody powerful, but they don't feel free. I mean, picture a young woman crying on body cam cam footage and the boyfriend is very calm when he's telling the story. Picture influencers who have an audience and they look really normal and healthy in the videos that they're posting. Picture every person who has ever been told, but they never hit you while their entire life was being monitored, restricted, degraded and controlled. But they never hit you. Let's move out of like, is the 1950s even 1980s? Oh, probably like 2000 and I don't know, 20. Like let's come to 20, 26 and say to ourselves this is a real thing that we need to understand and we need to apply logically in our lives and to actual cases that we're seeing all over the media. The two biggest things that are selling right now, true crime and sports. Guys, when you're in a, a relationship with coercive control, you're not free to say no. You don't feel like you are you. You don't feel like you are free to leave or disagree or to have friends or to have privacy or money or sleep. You don't feel like you're free to tell the truth. You don't free, you don't feel free to even experience your own emotions and love. A relationship should not require that level of captivity. I hope you hear this. If you are in this feel that coercive control is not just like, oh, we're in love and we have issues. No, it's domination and it's just with domination with rose colored glasses on. And just remember that most people come from this mindset. Well, if you don't have a bruise, you weren't abused. Just use discernment and understand that God, people are fucking manipulative. And when they want to and when they're well practiced, practiced, they can do whatever they want to people. And it is so freaking dangerous. Anyways, that's been kind of my roundup of coercive control. And we will go into the elements of dark psychology and forensic psychology again next week. Thank you for listening or watching intentionally disturbing with Dr. Leslie. Catch you next week.